If Linux had a market share of 2.8% in 2002 and a similar share in 2003, then the Google Zeitgeist should have shown some increase in Linux install base by the end of 2003 since over 250 million PC's were sold in the last 2 years.
Not necessarily. The Zeitgeist numbers are based on about 55 billion hits. Since we are apparently accepting that the 55 billion hits represent the actual numbers of machines in use in the world we'll assume that each of the hits represents an individual PC. To continue the world of make believe, if we pretend that the sales figures from the last two years of 250 million were all Linux machines, that would only give Linux .45% of the install base, while it would have represented a 100% market share for the past two years.
Instead, it is at 1% Jan 2001 and was at 1% in Jan 2002, and 1% in Jan 2003 and is still at 1%.
Quite true, of the 250 million machines sold in the last two years, Linux was installed on about seven million of them. Once again, in keeping with the "fact" that there are 55 billion separate machines in use out there (an assumption I have to make since you seem to think that this accurately represents market share), seven million machines works out to an increase of .013%.
So the Google numbers would not necessarily dismiss the reality that Linux accounted for 2.8% of the desktop OS sales for the 2002 fiscal year, would they?
Gains ground?
1% of the market year after year after year means there is no chance to gain ground.
Wrong. There are gains, they are just extremely minute gains, barely worth measuring at this point. Linux will have to come up with an absolute "killer app" and alot of decent, well-known games if it wants to stand a chance of making serious inroads into the desktop space.
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